Jonathan's blog

Week 3 confirmed my week 1 heroics as a fluke. Again I managed to start an inactive player (Donte Stallworth this time), and there were only 4 touchdowns by players on my roster (3 of which were by players I benched). Needless to say, I got whipped.

This week's episode of the The Hill was really interesting...watching Wexler and his staff trying to decide whether or not to vote for the Republican-introduced bill to withdraw immediately from Iraq (which they introduced after Murtha called for withdrawal to basically force Democrats to vote to stay in Iraq) and what a game the whole process was.

From The Week, September 15, 2006, p 8:

The Bureau of Land Management admitted this week it had failed to track the environmental consequences of oil and gas drilling on public lands. When the Bush administration first opened the Rockies to drilling six years ago, the BLM promised to monitor the activity's effects on water and wildlife. But in a confidential report obtained by The Washington Post, the bureau said its inspectors were too busy reviewing drilling applications to perform environmental studies.

The Washington Post article is here. Wonder why some folks are skeptical about the government's commitment to properly balance business and environmental concerns?

Some good news...from an article of the same title in the NY Times by Bruce Lambert:

Friday night's season opener pitting the Cold Spring Harbor Seahawks against their perennial championship archrival, the Roosevelt Rough Riders, is the football game that almost didn't happen. The Seahawks come from a wealthy white Long Island district with top-rated schools, while the Rough Riders live in a working-class community of blacks and Hispanics whose dysfunctional schools forced a state takeover in 2002. Four years ago Cold Spring Harbor officials canceled the Seahawks' trip 14 miles south to play Roosevelt, citing safety concerns after an off-campus shooting in the community, unrelated to the school or its athletics, killed a youth. The teams resumed playing the next season amid hurt feelings, but their annual face-off was jeopardized this spring when Roosevelt's budget troubles eliminated the district's entire interscholastic sports program. Then members of the Seahawks' booster club began sending in donations, adding to the $15,000 that Roosevelt parents had managed to raise. A Seahawks captain, Peter Ottaviano, and a few teammates went to Roosevelt's turf to join their rivals in fund-raising car washes. And at the end of August, an anonymous businessman from Cold Spring Harbor sent an eye-popping $20,000, just in time for the school board to reinstate the football program before classes resumed. "Well, bless them," Ebene Gabaud, 17, a Rough Riders linebacker and captain, said this week. "Basically, without them, we wouldn't have a season."

Via Today's Papers, from an article of the same title in the LA Times:

As Democrats drive to extend their power in Congress, holding on to Debbie Stabenow's Senate seat is a must. And the Michigan incumbent is currently ahead in the polls. But Republican strategists are working hard to upset Stabenow, in part through a low-profile appeal to a group that most politicians rarely think of as a voting bloc - snowmobilers. And the stealth campaign to woo the thousands of working-class, historically Democratic Michiganders whose cold-weather passion is snowmobiles is just one small example of a technique known as "micro-targeting" that GOP strategists are using across the country as they try to pull off another election day victory against the odds. By most measures, the November elections offer Democrats their best chance in years. If anti-Republican sentiment turns out to be a tidal wave, strategic and tactical brilliance may not be enough to protect the GOP majorities in Congress. But if control of Congress comes down to three or four dozen closely contested races, as now seems likely, then micro-targeting and the other technologies that Republicans are using in battleground states could make a difference. The GOP system - built around a database nicknamed Voter Vault - combines huge amounts of demographic, financial and other personal information on individual voters with the data-mining techniques used by direct-mail advertisers to deliver surgically targeted appeals to voters identified as likely to respond, including many who might be considered part of the Democratic base. In Michigan, for example, the GOP contacted snowmobilers by mail, telephone or other personal communication suggesting that Democrats' environmental views stood in the way of greater opportunities for snowmobiling. Though details of the GOP system are secret, snowmobilers and other categories of voters are identified from such diverse sources as credit card transactions, product warranty files, magazine subscription lists, consumer surveys, vehicle registrations and other public records.